It is common for a variety of goods, articles, products and so on offered for sale in stores, shops and the like to be stocked, often in quantity, on/in shelves, racks, cases, bins, etc. for inspection and selection by consumers. The display of pricing information at the location of each product, i.e. at the point of sale, is ordinarily necessary, or at the very least desirable, as price tends to be a major factor in product choice. Moreover, certain products are often promoted or emphasized for sale at certain times, e.g. as “specials”, “two for the price of one”, “discounts” and like “buyer-appealing” phrases, by means of advertisement and/or price reductions and the display to the potential purchaser of the desired advertising information or reduction in price can be critical to the success of such promotion.
While small pricing stickers may be adhered to individual products and/or somewhat larger pricing tickets or tags can be and are mounted, e.g. seated in a shallow channel along the front edge of the shelf or rack, as is the usual practice, in proximity to each group of products, such display “media” are too small to draw the attention of a prospective purchaser and the amount of information that can be provided on tickets or tags is limited, being usually restricted to identification and price alone, making the exhibition of appealing advertising material to entice an undecided customer almost out of the question. In any event, this kind of display is the same on many if not all of the products at each shelf or rack and lacks the distinctive character required for significant impact on the perception of a prospective purchaser in that it does not differentiate from regular pricing tickets or stand out from the remainder of the merchandise in the area.
One common approach to this problem of effective advertising displays is in the form of a quadrangular frame having mutually facing channels around at least three of the frame side into which a display placard can be inserted and retained. Examples of this approach can be found and U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,996,616, 2,581,742, and 2,981,018. Similar holders for smaller cards such as plastic credit cards or driver's licenses are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,629,952 and 4,674,628. An improved and simplified frame of this general type invented by me can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,442,873, issued on Aug. 22, 1995.
While such quadrangular frames are quite useful, they are subject to certain unavoidable limitations or disadvantages. First, since advertising placards typically vary in size depending upon the circumstances of their use, i.e. different levels of a sale promotion may call for placards of different sizes to vary the extent of customer impact or certain articles may require the display of different amounts of advertising information, an “inventory” of such frames of different sizes must be kept on hand with the attendant complications of storage, handling etc. Even if placard size can be standardized to a single size, the frames are relatively bulky which introduces a problem of storage and, given their fragility by reason of the minimization of their marginal cross-section so as to maximize the interior display area, are susceptible to breakage and replacement from time to time.
Consequently, there continues to be a need in the merchandizing field for an advertising placard display support that is free of these kinds of drawbacks.